“And so what,” Ignacio said, clearly irritated by the man’s evasiveness, “does the amulet do when empowered by the God?”
“It opens the Gates,” Isidora whispered. She stared mistrustfully at the amulet in her hand, then looked at Finnéces. The Alesian nodded and sunk back into his chair, reaching blindly for Edan’s hand. The boy buried his face into the elder man’s shoulder.
“What is beyond the Gates?” Serephina asked. “Is it the army you spoke of?”
Isidora frowned uncertainly. She did not look like a queen any longer, but rather young woman with burdens to great for her years. Falteringly, she said, “I assumed we would find aid from the descendants of Alesia, that they were the key.”
Hadrian shook his head, though not without sympathy. “There are not enough mystics left alive to form an army, my lady, let alone any who have been trained in the handling of power as you have.”
“What is beyond the Gates?” Serephina repeated more loudly.
Hadrian shrugged. “It is impossible to say.”
“Not impossible,” Lucero disagreed, “merely theoretical. Right now it is not as important to know what is Beyond as it is to hypothesize as to what the High Cleric believes. Have you any ideas, son?”
Hadrian looked at his father, a frown lining his brow.
Arturo shifted, drawing unwanted attention. He cleared his throat, spoke haltingly, “The oldest of scrolls in this Vault speak of the time before the birth of the Gods, when the world was overrun by beasts. Mythic creatures of fantastic proportion. The phoenix, a bird whose wings are flame. Centaurs, beings with human torsos and the bodies of stallions. Dragons, giants, sphinxes, sea serpents, and the like. Creatures of nightmares.” He gave a self-deprecating smile, feeling ridiculous that he was speaking of these beasts as though they truly existed. “It’s likely they never lived, but were created by the idle minds to scare children into submission.”
“Or to explain uncommon events,” Diego added. “Sailors often tell stories of sea serpents attacking their ships. Usually the tales originate in the North Sea, where glaciers often appear without warning, sometimes rising suddenly from the depths to strike the belly of the ship.”
“It’s a simple thing to explain with logic what defies explanation otherwise,” Lucero commented mildly.
Diego frowned. “Are we to believe Viccole thinks he can summon these creatures forth? For what purpose?”
“Ah, the ultimate question,” the Scholar sighed.
“He wishes to drive every last heretic from the land,” Arturo supplied. “It’s obvious the man is taken with madness, to pursue arcane arts in order to destroy the very mystics who use them.”
As soon as the words passed his lips, his breath paused in his lungs. His gaze slanted across the room at his partner; Diego was pale beneath his tan.
“What is it?” Serephina asked. “Why do you look at each other that way?”
Unable to help himself, Arturo looked at Isidora. She gazed back at him, brows lifting as his stare lengthened. “Armando is blamed for the Year of Death,” he said. “Perhaps he was not the sole responsible party.”
“What are you talking about, Bellamont?” Serephina demanded.
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” he continued, lost within his spinning thoughts. “Armando was never a zealous man. For long years of his rule, he was foremost a diplomat, a voice of temperance. It changed, he changed, after…”
Isidora’s eyes grew dark as a roiling sea. “You’re talking about my parents, aren’t you?” she asked with soft fury. “You believe they had something to do with the Year of Death?” She turned sharply to Serephina. “My parents visited this kingdom years ago, before my birth, and petitioned for an audience with your father. They stayed not more than a month, then returned to Alesia. I do not know the purpose of their visit, for they never spoke of it. When the Year of Death came and passed, to mention it in their presence was anathema. I never discovered why.”
Looking at her, Arturo could see that she did know, and was lying.
She knows.
Diego, having reached the same conclusion, made a choking noise, then a show of pounding his chest to clear his airway. Arturo stood completely still; it was all he could do to keep his expression blank.
“My father was a temperamental man,” Serephina ventured. “Perhaps something your parents did, or said—” With a soft cry, Isidora turned her back to the room. Her eyes were closed, hand held over trembling lips. “My lady, I apologize,” the princess said quickly, “I do not mean to associate your parents with what happened after their visit.” She looked beseechingly around the room.
“Now it’s all muddled,” chided the Scholar. “Bellamont, be so kind as to continue your first line of thought, that of Armando’s sudden shift in religious conviction.”
The reminder hit him like lightening. His body began to hum with tension, uncoiling from stillness to pace before the hearth. “Luther is not mad at all,” he murmured to himself. “He took advantage of the king’s weakness, coerced him to take up a holy cause and uproot mystics across the peninsula. He called it a crusade, but in truth he was merely looking for the amulet. But why does Luther want the amulet so badly, and if he finds it, how can he possibly use it? Unless…”
Hadrian gripped the edge of the table. “Dear God,” he gasped.
“Indeed,” Lucero said. With graceful, precise movements, the maimed Scholar stood. He faced the gathering, turning his head slowly, pausing uncannily on every person gathered. “Luther Viccole is a mystic, and High Cleric of the God. He is fueled by fanaticism, and believes himself a vehicle of Anshar’s will. In his greed, he wishes to eradicate all peoples with blood ties to the Gods. With the amulet in his control, he will be the only mystic left. A god of his own making. He will never stop seizing power, not until there is an empire at his bidding.”
“He who controls the amulet controls the Gates of Beyond,” Isidora whispered.
Arturo was at her side in two steps. He took her hands in his, brought them to his chest. “If you ask me to kill him,” he murmured fiercely, “I will go this minute. I will not fail.”
She shivered at his touch, at the naked, powerful emotion in his eyes. Without doubt, she knew that if she spoke the words, he would go, armed with knives and silence, to bring death to the High Cleric of the God.
“No,” she whispered.
The Minister of War made to speak, but Diego shot him such a quelling look that he closed his mouth without question. The princess Serephina smiled to herself, a trifle sadly, as she watched Bellamont give to another what she had so longed to receive.
“No,” Lucero said lightly, effectively shattering the gravity of the moment. “Bellamont will certainly not assassinate Viccole. It would only cause the finest army in the peninsula to choose another leader, possibly the esteemed Cleric Rinaldo. We’d be disposing of a fanatic and replacing him with a lunatic.”
“Point taken,” grumbled Ignacio. “Our plan is what, then?”
“It’s simple, really,” Hadrian said, having regained enough of his wits to speak. “We leave the city without being noticed by the thousands of soldiers likely searching for us, travel to the north of Tanalon, find an army in pitchfork bearing, mystically attuned peasant-folk, open the gates of Beyond, and ride to glory on the backs of unicorns.”
Serephina emitted a shrill little laugh. The Minister of War gave her a peculiar look, then drew his hands over his face in exasperation. Lucero smiled fondly at his son, who was hastily uncorking a bottle of brandy. Diego Roldan, having considered the cleric’s pronouncement, grinned at the prospect of riding on a winged animal with his sword in his hand.
Finnéces and the mute boy Edan clasped hands and bowed their heads in prayer.
Arturo looked into Isidora’s eyes and murmured, “Whatever you decide, I stand with you.”
S
he searched his face. “Why?”
He lifted her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss against her knuckles. His warm breath passed her fingers and she shuddered. “You know the answer, my lady.” He looked up, eyes burned gold by the firelight. “I cannot help what I am. There is war ahead of us, and bloodshed. I fear becoming a monster in your eyes.”
Isidora touched his face with her free hand, wiping away a speck of dried blood. He closed his eyes and she saw, with some surprise, a tremor run down his spine. “If I cannot ever understand you, at least I can accept you as you are. Perhaps someday you, too, will find acceptance within.”
He nodded and, with effort, released her hand. Turning, he spoke to the room, “Leaving the city will be easier than we think. There is a passage from this Vault that opens outside the walls of Vianalon. I am fairly certain someone will be waiting to take us across the river.”
Ignacio frowned. “Who is mad enough to do such a thing?”
“I know a man,” Arturo said.
Chapter Seventeen
In Vianalon, the weeks following the death of King Armando were marked by unnatural calm. Since witnessing the gruesome deaths of the Church Soldiers outside the palace gates, the citizens of the capital had affected a subdued presence, as of a city stunned by its sudden occupation by a foreign and vicious enemy.
There was a strict curfew in place for sundown, but the streets were often empty an hour or more before. Taverns, bakeries, restaurateurs, and the poor suffered greatly in those weeks, as crucial imports of fresh meats and grain dwindled and prices subsequently soared.
In Thieves Alley, where even the Church Soldiers feared to walk after night had fallen, and meat was cheap if you didn’t mind its age, Lenora di Salvatoré sat on a cushioned stool in a dimly lit room as one of her girls—young Alian, tonight—brushed her long dark hair with an ivory comb.
The reflection in the vanity mirror showed a woman in her prime, her beauty having cycled through the awkward newness of spring to settle within the lush, abundant fertility of summer years. Her eyes were wide, soft black, framed by such an abundance of dark lashes that, with a careful lifting of eyelids, she was often misjudged as a gentle soul.
A trick of fate she had used to her advantage more than once.
Her skin, whiskey gold, unflawed and silky to the touch, was maintained daily by massage of special oils, procured in bulk and brought to her from a foreign land. She did not care which one, whether there was danger in the undertaking, or what unsavory ingredients lent the oils their earthy, pungent smell. And, neither, as it happened, did the pirate who brought her package twice yearly.
He received ample pay, monetary and otherwise, for his efforts. So rewarding, in fact, was the illegal import business with Lenora, Mistress of Thieves Alley, that a fortnight after the king’s death and seizing of the palace by High Cleric Viccole, she had turned down the hundredth offer for escape from Vianalon and sent word about that if one more petition came—however heartfelt—she would see its speaker broken and buried alive.
Alian’s hand paused in its rhythm.
Lenora blinked, first at the blank, cold visage of her own reflection, then, smoothing her countenance, at the girl’s startled gaze in the mirror. The smile that came to her lips was not kind, for Lenora was not known for kindness, but it was familiar. Alian visibly relaxed, young cheeks flushing.
She was a recent import to the Alley, her story a common one. The eldest of three daughters born to a farmer and his wife. Her sisters had been successfully bartered into marriage, but not Alian, with her uncommonly pale eyes. In her home village she had been subject to lashings since age four, blamed for crop failure, a neighbors mule gone lame, the son of the smith smashing his fingers as she walked by. Her eyes, clear, pale blue, were an anomaly, a curse.
Not so in Thieves Alley, whose Mistress took in so many lost, runaway children and gave them succor like a mother to a babe. A home, an income, a roof over their heads.
She did not ask much, only obedience, unquestioning and in all things.
A knock came upon the door and the combing paused again as Alian looked inquiringly at her Mistress. Upon Lenora’s nod, she placed the comb carefully on the vanity’s counter before moving across the room.
Lenora did not turn her head to greet her visitor; her mirror was positioned in such a way that she merely redirected her gaze toward the man now filling the doorframe. Her brother’s broad, muscled shoulders were tense under the finely spun cloth of his blouse. He looked from Alian’s face to the one in the mirror, running a hand in habit through his prematurely graying hair.
“What is it, Astin?” she asked softly.
“Another boy’s gone missing,” he said, voice pitched low.
Lenora took a breath and counted to ten. When she was certain of her calm, she rose from the vanity and turned. “When and where?”
“Two days ago,” he replied. “He was prone to assignations at night, a gambler by trade. His crew tells me he has never been gone from the Alley more than a day.”
“No sudden departure to visit family?” she asked, without real hope.
Astin shook his head. “He spoke of collecting a debt before rent, due three days hence.”
Lenora’s breath hissed through her teeth. From the corner of her eye she saw Alian standing against the wall, thin body shaking. “Do you know this boy, my child?” she asked softly.
Alian jerked, nodding. “Erico,” she said. “Last week I heard him boasting about the collection, that he would have coin to spare after his rent.”
What she did not say, and did not need to, was that others would be depending on young Erico’s promise of loans. With no one to pickpocket or swindle after dark, the denizens of the Alley were worried. Lenora had decided just this evening to lower the monthly tithe.
Too late, it seemed.
“Do you know from whom he was collecting this debt?” she asked.
Alian shook her head. “A prominent merchant in the city.”
Lenora glanced sharply at Astin. “Get me a name, brother.”
He nodded. “This is the eighth boy in half as many weeks, Lenora,” he said gravely. “What will we do?”
She spun toward the mirror, heart pumping fury through her rigid limbs. “It is time to pay a visit to an old friend,” she said, then snarled, “Leave me, both of you.”
The Mistress of Thieves Alley, known more commonly as the Dark Mistress due to her penchant for poisons and dead lovers, left her domain of Vianalon’s ten most debauched, decrepit blocks near the southern wall for the first time since King Armando’s death.
No one saw her slim, black-clad figure leave, though later many would proclaim they’d felt a chill as she passed through the empty streets after curfew, wraith-like and hooded, near the midnight hour.
*
Lenora waited patiently in the shadowy alcove for the midnight prayers to finish. As the last earnest, young voices of novice clerics faded into the still night, she added her own silent prayer, as she always did, for the safekeeping of memory.
Far to the south and west of Vianalon, in the remote province of Avosilea by the Sea where she had been born, memory was the only true prayer. For without memory, the life-sustaining trades of that windswept coast would not pass from generation to generation. Those of Avosilea, who measured time with tides and omens in the spray of sea foam, guarded their memories, and their magics, with all the fervor of a race whittled down to a tiny, forgotten ember of an extinguished fire.
It was Lenora’s hope, and theirs, that the ember could again become a blaze.
She listened to the footsteps in the hallway, far away but nearing steadily, and summoned memory. She cast her mind into the distant past. Trained as she had been since birth, memory came, vivid and bright. It was a long, rocky climb she recalled, the wind’s keening in her ears sounding so near to wails of pain that her
younger self had nearly lost courage.
No one would know if she reached the eyrie. She could spin a tale of what the enchantress had told her of herself…
But as the memories of the Avosileans stood grounded firmly on truth, they would have instinctively sensed her betrayal. In the end she had woven the scraps of her courage into a rope and pulled herself onto the final ledge, to collapse on stone that was smoothed to a dull sheen by centuries of supplicants like her, young and afraid and brave. Her mother and father, grandparents, uncles and aunts, her older brother, Astin, who had made the climb two years prior.
They had come, as she did, for an answer. The questions were always different, and the same, but despite memory, Lenora could not remember hers. Only the figure with eyes like fire standing just within the eyrie’s mouth, her robes and knotted hair unstirred by wind as Lenora lay flat on the smooth stone, black hair whipping around her narrow shoulders.
Then a thin, delicate hand slowly lifted, ivory beads clacking across brown knuckles.
Memory faded as footsteps grew near. As the figure passed the alcove, she stepped forward and matched the man’s stride.
Rather than admitting surprise at her presence, the High Cleric smiled, the kind, beneficent smile she so loathed. “My dear, it’s quite late for a woman to be abroad,” he said.
She made no comment, merely stopped as he did and waited for him to unlock the door to his private chambers. Once inside, she strode to the low wooden cabinet and poured herself a glass of brandy. Turning, she watched dispassionately as the self-professed Savior of Tanalon sunk wearily onto a thickly cushioned couch.
“Pour me something, would you, my dear?” he asked, closing his eyes.
For a moment Lenora thought of the ivory handled knife hanging from her belt. “Yes,” she said at length, and brought him a glass of the dark wine he favored.
She settled into a chair opposite the couch. “What happened to your ear?” she asked. There was a thick bandage covering the side of his head. Reflexively, Viccole lifted a hand to touch it, then abruptly lowered his hand to his lap.
The Gardens of Almhain Page 14